I got a few questions about the Before Times from my post yesterday – mostly asking about how the Internet finally materialized out of government funding and corporate phone companies…
Being a bit of a scholar of this sort of thing, back in 2004 I took the opportunity to go and visit a spot in Virginia where a lot of what we think of as the Internet came to be…
The series of ownership stickers on that utility box is why we are here…The ownership stickers changed as this box’s owners went from Lightnet (top) to WilTel (middle) to MCI (bottom).
Set your way back machine for 1983: CSX Corp and SNET (Southern New England Telephone) teamed up to create a new kind of private line service using the latest technology called fiber optics.
SNET provided the technical knowhow to make the network work, and CSX had the easements and property rights (being a major train company) to put it in. This new company was called, creatively, “LightNet” and it covered roughly 5000 miles and served more than 40 cities east of the Mississippi.
LightNet provided interstate private line telecommunications service to other common carriers such as US Sprint (heard of them?) and government agencies for voice, data, and video.
This same year LDDS (Long Distance Discount Service) is formed… More about them though in about a decade…
In 1985 another new company was formed, “WilTel”, who used decommissioned pipelines as conduits for buried fiber optic lines in operational easements. WilTel’s network covered 27 major cities west of the Mississippi… Places like Minneapolis; Omaha; Kansas City; St. Louis; Tulsa; Oklahoma City; Dallas; Houston; Denver; Salt Lake City; Los Angeles; and many others.
In September of 1987 LightNet and WilTel hammered out an interconnect agreement that tied the two networks together and created a coast-to-coast fiber network and laid the groundwork for a US spanning pure digital “backbone”.
Essentially the first inklings of a national “internet” that could be accessed by everyone, not just universities, were formed by these two companies back in 1987.
One could literally hang a sign on the fence that says “The Internet Started Here”.
Ok, so we move onwards.
1989 WilTel buys LightNet in its entirety for something like $365 million.
1990 WilTel and MCI announce a long term agreement to access each other’s fiber networks. This creates a network of over 50,000 system miles, or the biggest fiber based network in the world.
1992 LDDS from a decade ago has become the fourth largest Long Distance carrier in the country by consuming anything it can fit into its corporate head.
1994 LDDS acquires Dial-Net, renames to LDDS Communications, then acquires IDB-WorldCom.
1995 LDDS Communications buys WilTel for $2.5 billion and becomes the provider for GTE, Ameritech, and SBC. The whole mess is renamed to “WorldCom”
1996 MFS (yet another octopus telcom company) buys UUNET. In turn WorldCom buys MFS.
1997 WorldCom buys CompuServe, buys MCI, buys Brooks Fiber, and renames to MCI-WorldCom.
1998 MCI-WorldCom becomes WorldCom.
1999 WorldCom tries to buy Sprint but is stopped when European and US governments wont allow it.
This is probably the reason the Sprint box is on the other side of the pole from the LightNet / WilTel / MCI box…
The LightNet / WilTel / MCI box is on the other side of this.You had one job, Sprint Guy…
And In 2002 WorldCom files a record bankruptcy case (3.8 billion) and renames back to MCI.
All of this happened around this little set of buildings next to some train tracks in Fredericksburg Virginia… Neat huh?
Listening to "Turn It Up" by The Alan Parsons Project
Believe it or not, there was a time before the Internet… It was a time simply known as “online”, where systems weren’t as interconnected as they are today and tended to be purpose built for a specific function – like a Bulletin Board System, or BBS.
My very first online experience was in 1981. Under the supervision of my father so I didn’t break anything, I was allowed to use his TRS-80 Model 1 and the 300 baud “Direct Connect” modem he had on it to dial into a local TRS-80 BBS he frequented.
The Direct Connect was so named because you could connect it to an actual phone line – and because of this it went much faster… Prior to this my father had an acoustic modem, which had two foam cups on top of the box where you set the handset for the phone and had a switch for 75 baud or 110 baud.
I think it was this revolutionary aspect of the ‘direct connect’ that prompted my father into letting me use it. 🙂
Anyway, In 1981 I was 12, so while I found the mechanics of the exercise fascinating I didn’t have much interest in the actual content of the BBS… A few weeks later I got my first computer – a Sinclair ZX-81. It came in kit form and was $99, but for a 12 year old it was a good machine.
My next foray into the online world came a few years later, in 1985. I was using an Atari 800XL which had an XM301 modem.
My family had moved to Golden Colorado, mid-school year, so I didn’t know anyone and tended to spend all of my time either at the Colorado School of Mines library on a terminal, or at home dialing into CSNet / NSFNet via the School of Mines, a local call, to do research via USENET.
This was The Internet before The Internet… It’s an easy way for me to feel old when I can say I was on the Internet before it actually existed. I also did a little CompuServe in 1985 – 1986, but the per-minute charges for the service upset my parents so my use was pretty sporadic.
In 1986 I joined the Navy and this curtailed my online exposure for several years. I didn’t even have another computer until 1989, which is when I picked up an Amiga 500. So my next online adventures happened in 1991, and 1991 through 1993 were pretty casual as all I really did was dial around to various Denver area Amiga boards.
In 1993 I’d upgraded to a Hayes “Optima” 9600 baud modem on my Amiga 500 and on June 16th, 1993 I created an account on “Empire of the Dragon” (EOTD), a local chat / RP board run by some guy who went by “IceDragon”. That account still exists and IceDragon (now going by other names) and I still talk on occasion on Second Life, almost 30 years later…
And in September 1993 AOL released the unwashed masses onto USENET, creating the Eternal September. At this time I was running my own BBS and was using FidoNet for my ‘online’ needs, so while I’d heard about it, it didn’t really impact me.
In mid 1994 I set up an account with a denver area dial up ISP and in late 1994 set up an account on FurryMUCK… That account still exists, and I still pal around with Rris, one of the ‘wizards’ from the early 90’s, also in Second Life.
Ultimately, the 90’s are where things really took off for the online world.
Modem speeds in 1990 were 9600 baud, and by 1997 56,000 baud was a thing. But if you were a true computer nerd, you departed analog in the mid 90’s and went digital…
Which is what I did; in March of 1995 I had ISDN (128Kbit) service in my bedroom. I had also moved on from the BBS scene and had gotten into The Internet – such as it was. And, because of the frame relay service I had, I didn’t need to rely on things like CompuServe or AOL to do it.
NSFNet, which I’d used when it was still shiny and new in 1985 was decommissioned on April 30th, 1995, and with this the Internet became a commercial enterprise… And accordingly my first website went online in October of 1995, hosted at dimensional.com in Denver.
By 1998 I had a full T1 (1.54 Mbit) running into my bedroom, though the bedroom was now in Rhoadesville Virginia versus Aurora Colorado. This is when things like rihahn.com (this domain), zebradale.com, ddw.net, pfmtek.com, and other domains went online – all hosted from my house.
From here things have been pretty much the same for me as everyone else; selections of cable internet providers and, as of last year, gigabit fiber. I still have a lot of my old domains from 20+ years ago, still ‘roll my own’ servers, and occasionally sit back and smile at how cool it all was before it became so commonplace. 🙂
Purely for the entertainment value, today I’m installing weird operating systems on my 17-inch 1.33Ghz PowerBook G4.
I briefly had MorphOS, the AmigaOS-alike offering, installed. I installed MorphOS via the last burnable DVD I had handy, so it was pretty easy to install; insert DVD, reboot, hold down alt, choose DVD, boot.
MorphOS looks nice, but doesn’t run well enough to warrant spending the money for a license.
Anyway, not having any more 5.25″ coasters handy everything else would need to be installed via USB – which on older hardware can require some deep magic… But fear not, I happen to have been there when the deep magic was created.
For example, you have to know that any USB stick you use has to be USB2. USB3 sticks simply won’t work. You also need to know your way around Open Firmware, which is the unix-esque boot environment on stranger hardware.
The next OS to be installed was Adélie Linux, which professes to be both PowerPC native and lightweight enough for a twenty year old machine.
To get Adélie Linux onto USB was a bit of an adventure in itself, mostly because my desktop is a bleeding edge Apple M1 running “Monterey”, the latest Apple OS… An OS where Apple seems to have decided no one needs to burn ISOs anymore.
So, after some experimentation here’s the method for booting a G4 off of an ISO burned to USB…
Format the USB as FAT (not 32) with a GUID partition map.
Get a copy of Balena Etcher and use it to spool the ISO to the USB stick.
Stick the USB into the G4 (USB port closest to the user on the right side) and turn it on
Hold down cmd-option-O-F to boot into open firmware.
Open Firmware harkens back to days when you needed to know things like hardware addresses for things you stuck into your computer, so it’s a bit archaic – but that makes it interesting!
Type dev usb0 ls – you’ve just told Open Firmware that you would like to look at USB0, and then asked for a listing of the stuff attached to USB0.
This should return /disk@1 – so there’s a disk residing on the USB0 bus – neat!
Now type dev disk@1 – now you told Open Firmware that you would like to look at the disk residing at USB0.
Now type pwd – this asks Open Firmware to display the Path Within Device-tree to the thing you’re looking at.
This should return: /pci@f2000000/usb@1b,1/disk@1 – this is the literal hardware path, so the PCI bus residing at f2000000 has a USB bus with a few ports, and USB port 1B has a disk image attached to it. Simple, right?
Now for the moment of truth. Type boot /pci@f2000000/usb@1b,1/disk@1:,\\:tbxi and hit enter – “\\:tbxi” basically tells Open Firmware that whatever bootable volume is at this address is ‘blessed’ and can be loaded.
The system will attempt to boot the image on the USB stick.
Now this information is probably useful to all of about a dozen people on the planet, but you never know. And it’s good mental exercise for me to dredge up all of this old useless information on occasion. 🙂
Anyway, Adélie Linux never ran quite right; the desktop appeared, but interacting with it just resulted in the flickers of menus and it was pretty much unusuable.
I went through the installs of a few other *nix distros that had a PPC variant, and eventually landed on MintPPC which seems to run well enough to be worth my time fixing all of the little driver issues.
The casual observer of ye olde blog here might have noticed that I’m kinda into this computer thing… I mean, I’ve been doing computery stuff since the late 70’s after all.
For me, it all started when my father got an OSI “Challenger 1P” in ’78 or ’79. Now, I wasn’t allowed to come within arm’s reach of this machine because my father was a bit territorial and no one was allowed to touch his stuff… But the fact it was in the house was enough to get my interest and get me reading up on it.
The next machine to enter my life was a Tandy TRS-80 model 1 my father brought home in 1980. It was the same story in that I wasn’t allowed to touch it, but the TRS-80 had a lot more documentation and it was easier to read up on it.
In 1981 I entered Junior High…
At school there were four Commodore PET machines in vacant a corner office, and no one did anything with them. They had clear vinyl dust covers on them when I found them, leading me to guess that A) even the teachers didn’t have any idea how to use them and B) that meant it was okay for me to monkey with them.
Remember, this is the mimeograph and overhead transparency era, so something like a personal computer just didn’t fit into the curriculum – yet.
I would spend the occasional recess in that corner office figuring out the vagaries of loading things from tape and playing with the classroom programs the machines came with.
Eventually though, with relentless pestering (and probably assuming I would soon void the hands-off policy on his machines), my father finally caved and bought me a Sinclair ZX-81 for Christmas in 1981.
The ZX-81 was a $99 kit in 1981, which is about three hundred dollars in 2022 money, and that really got me started on both hardware and software systems. I also became even more of a social outcast by adding ‘geek’ to my already well-worn ‘nerd’ moniker from being a gamer.
I found that I had a legitimate talent with computers, and by the end of my first month I’d written my first text adventure based on my AD&D world… The problem with the ZX81 is it had no storage when I got it, so everything I wrote I wrote on paper and typed in every time I wanted to run it.
My father eventually gave me his old Radio Shack portable cassette recorder, and I got that plugged into the ZX81 to save and load stuff. And a month or two after that, the routine showing off of things I’d written prompted my father to get me a 16K ram expansion and an actual keyboard for the ZX-81. And by summer I had filled my big tape case with software I’d written for the thing.
Some time in 1982 I managed to score a Commodore VIC-20 – I think via my grandmother for my birthday… The VIC-20 was a $299 machine in 1982, which is roughly a grand in 2022 dollars – so it was a pretty impressive thing to have.
The VIC was where things really started to take off for me with computers; it had a pretty descent processor that was the emerging industry standard for personal computing (6502), enough ram to be useful, a nice keyboard, and enough bells and whistles to be entertaining to write things for.
In 1984 I started High School at Skyline… Probably my favorite part of starting High School was that Skyline had a computer class – if you could call it that…
Computer Operation and Data Entry was an elective, and it was integrated into the math department. And even though the school had owned a half-dozen Apple IIe machines for a couple of years at this point, the class is really self-study because no one in administration had a clue what to do with the systems.
The computer lab itself was right off of the library, on the second floor, so it was easy to get books and take them to the desk for reference.
Most of the self-study course work used Apple Logo, which bored me to death, but I could get the lesson done in 5-10 minutes, do the typing drills really quick, and then move on to my own projects… The machines at the school also had “Koala Pads” which, while primitive, kinda got me into the tablet thing decades before tablets were a thing…
Outside of school I’d been working in 6502 assembly for a year or so, using the VicMon cartridge on my VIC-20 (I blew past BASIC in a couple of months because BASIC eats up too much of the limited VIC-20 memory). The Apple machines also used a 6502, so most of my time on the school’s Apple IIe’s was either learning stuff I was interested in (D/A converters were my thing in 10th grade, I wanted to build a robotic arm), working on my own programs, or reverse-engineering games to see how they work.
My first legit ‘software hack’ was in 1985, on those machines at Skyline… Using a hex editor, I removed the copy protection from a friend’s copy of “Karateka” so that I could play it too.
A couple of times up there in the computer lab I got so focused on whatever it was I was working on that I missed my next class, which was Graphic Design. Fortunately, it was another elective, and I wasn’t too worried about it.
This was the beginning of the end of school for me. I started to evaluate electives by how much time they took away from whatever hardware or software project I was working on…
For my machines at home, I’d been trying to talk my parents into springing for a Commodore 64 now that they’d come down in price – mostly to get my hands on the 6510 and its extra I/O lines… But then I saw some news about Atari’s new “XL” series, and they looked pretty sweet.
And then there was Apple’s ad for the “Macintosh”, which was amazing, and the whole ‘mouse’ and ‘graphical user interface’ thing looked absolutely killer… There’s no way I could get one though as they were really, really expensive; $2500 in 1985 dollars or $6700 in 2022.
I really wanted a 68000-based machine though… Someday!
In 1985 my grandmother passed away and left her house in Golden to my father and my aunt. My father bought out my aunt’s half and we moved after my 11th grade year had started at Skyline.
During the 1985 upheaval I got an Atari 800XL as something of a concession prize from my parents, which I updated with two Happy-mod 1050 disk-drives and an XM301 300 baud modem.
I had that 800XL until after I had enlisted and moved to my duty station, so July-ish of 1987. A guy in the barracks had an Apple Macintosh Plus though, and I spent a pretty decent amount of time messing with it. It was greyscale, but I still really, really, really wanted a 68K based system now.
I finally got a 68K machine in September of 1989, in the form of an Amiga 500. My ex-wife and I gave that Amiga a helluva workout over the next couple of years…
I finally replaced the Amiga with an IBM PC in late 1993, mostly for my BBS efforts. And then in 1994 I started work at “Intelligent Electronics”, where things really took off.
At one point in late 1995 my living room / computer cave contained a PowerMac 8100/100 (PowerPC), an HP9000 C110 (PA-RISC), a DEC AlphaStation (DEC Alpha), an SGI Indy (MIPS), and probably a half dozen assorted generic PCs in various states of assembly.
I wasn’t happy with learning one architecture, I wanted to learn ALL the architectures!
August 1995
March 13th, 1997 – file server, Internet server with ISDN router and 56K backup, and the BBS server
March 13th, 1997 – my ‘art station’ with my HUGE digitizer
This sort of madness continued into 1997 when I sold off a lot of it to move to Virginia.
Post-move things calmed down a bit with regard to weird computers and architectures. I tended to use an Apple PowerMac 6500/225 for my personal machine and a handful of Pentium II and III-based machines for games and Internet stuff… The weirdest thing was probably the DEC Multia VX40 I was using as the email server…
In 1998 I picked up an Apple PowerBook G3 (Wallstreet) and used that as my “personal” computer for a couple of years. I also had a couple of generic PCs that I used for EverQuest duty.
In February 2000, after we’d all survived the Clockpocalypse of 2000 and right before I moved to northern Connecticut for a teaching job, the G3 Wallstreet was traded out for a G3 Pismo.
By 2003 the G3 laptop had gotten pretty long in the tooth, so I sold it to pick up a rather generic Compaq S5000 machine and an Nvidia FX 5600 at the local Best Buy (Mostly to play Shadowbane and Horizons on), and then gave the Compaq to Robin before jetting back to Virginia in February of 2004.
In late February 2004 I picked up the first 17″ PowerBook G4, which turned out to have a screen defect…
Apple replaced it and I used the second 17″ G4 until shortly after I started at where I currently work… They wanted me to do PC things, so I needed a PC, so in early October 2004 I sold the PowerBook and bought yet another generic PC.
This sort of thing has continued on for nearly two decades now; around my birthday I’ll get a new Mac because I like Macs – and then some time during the next year I’d sell it and get a PC for a while.
The PCs are usually pretty generic gaming rigs filled with whatever the latest Intel is and some cutting edge video card – so they aren’t really worth mentioning. The Macs though can usually be used to reference a specific point in time as they are specific models… So here’s the full list:
Powerbook 165c in 1994 (still have)
PowerMac 8100/100 in 1995 (sold)
PowerMac 6500/225 in 1997 (sold)
PowerBook G3 Wallstreet in 1998 (sold)
PowerBook G3 Pismo in 2000 (still have)
17″ PowerBook G4 in 2004 (still have)
17″ iMac G5 in 2004 (still have)
20″ iMac in 2006 (sold)
24″ iMac in 2008 (sold)
13″ MacBook in 2010 (still have)
27″ iMac in 2013 (sold)
17″ MacBook Pro in 2014 (sold)
11″ MacBook Air in 2015 (still have)
15″ MacBook Pro in 2019 (sold)
16″ MacBook Pro in 2019 (traded in)
27″ iMac in 2020 (traded in)
13″ M1 MacBook Air in 2020 (sold)
And the latest M1 Max powered 16″ MacBook Pro this year…
That’s a slightly crazy amount of money spent on Macs – though I tend to sell the Macs for close to what I paid for them, or trade them in at Apple for the bigger better machine – so it’s not as bad as it looks.
Still, Apple should give me some stock or something for being such a long time customer. 🙂
A bonus photo of every Macintosh CPU line Apple has used, all running side by side:
Left to right: Motorola 68030 running System 7.1, Motorola PowerPC G4 running OSX 10.5.8, Intel Core 2 Duo running MacOS 10.13.6, Apple M1 running MacOS 11.0.1
My 1-of-6000 Collector’s Edition Atari VCS 800 arrived today.
I got it all set up and played some Asteroids and Tempest with the roommate, which was tons of fun. The vector graphics emulation is really cool, and the controllers are amazing.
Here’s a few photos for posterity:
Fresh out of the shipping box. I really like the attention to detail on the boxes, with the silkscreened asteroids graphics.The Collector’s Edition with its actual wood accents. The fit and finish of the machine is top-notch and it feels really solid.Number 2292 of 6000
I got it hooked up to the TV and turned on, where the system did an OS and BIOS update, which took a few minutes. After that though, it was a seamless experience and the built-in games (arcade cabinets and original 2600 games) were well presented and easy to navigate.
And it was really cool to see the original Atari Font in use again.
So far I can say Atari nailed it. It’s an amazing little machine and the reproductions of classic Atari games are perfect.
My PowerBook G4 has been under the proverbial knife getting all of the worn parts replaced with new old-stock parts — which is a nice thing about the older laptops; user serviceable parts inside.
The G4 now has a new DC-in and left-side USB board, a new NVRAM battery and right-side USB board, a new bluetooth module, new battery to charge controller harness, a new battery, new 65w charger brick, and a new 8x “superdrive”.
Older 4x superdrive removed (the empty spot with the writing on it)NOS 8x drive foreground and original 4x drive. The new M1 MacBook Air is in the background.NOS NVRAM battery and USB board installed. There’s two Panasonic lithium coin cells under the plastic.Old DC-in board removed – check out the scoring on the barrel connector. The ambient light sensor is in the clear plastic at the top of the board.NOS DC-in board in place, as well as the NOS bluetooth module (small board on top of the speaker housing)
Once everything was done I buttoned her back up, ran the hardware checks to make sure everything was functional, and then re-installed OS X 10.5.8 to test the new drive.
Everything seems to be working fine.
The new charging system works — the light on the DC in from the wall wart now works and the battery took a full charge and tested to a 2.5 hour run time (back in the early aughts 2 hours was pretty good for a desktop replacement machine). And the system keeps time now when it’s unplugged… Bonus.
All in all, I’m fairly happy with how it all went. And the G4 is now pretty much new. 🙂
Being as I traded in my 2019 16″ MacBook Pro on the new 2020 27″ iMac, meaning it needed to go back to Apple, I’m running on an old 13″ MacBook for work this week.
Apple MacBook “Core 2 Duo” 2.4 13″ (Mid-2010) running 10.13.6
Like the rest of my Mac Stuff, this 2010 white polycarbonate MacBook is both a fully working system and is in excellent condition. It’s been upgraded to 8Gigs of ram (the max it will use), and has a new 120G SSD and battery in it — both from Newer Tech.
With the zombies and all I have a lot of videoconferences to attend of a day, and the MacBook Pro used to be my go-to for daily operations here at work. I’m happy to say the decade-old MacBook, while a bit more sedate, works just as well.
A half dozen VPNs for remote operations on servers, running both wired and wireless networks, monitoring email, video chats, working on documentation, running iTunes, cruising the web… I’ve not found anything it won’t do.
So, even though I only need this machine for a few days before the new laptop gets here, it’s performing admirably.
Oh, that’s right! I ordered one of the new M1 laptops on Tuesday. I got the notice from Apple that it’s leaving Shanghai today and will be delivered Monday.
When it gets here and I get it set up, I’ll be sure to comment on the performance of the new “Apple Silicon” — as well as post a photo of a 68000-based Apple laptop, a PPC-based Apple laptop, an x86-based Apple laptop, and an M1-based Apple laptop all running at the same time… 30 years of architecture changes, and I have mint examples for all of it.
A few weeks ago I was successful in re-acquiring my old pre-y2k rihahn.com domain, and decided I should put some sort of service on it. Said service would have to be suitably archaic though, so I spent some time pondering it…
Last week I settled on using an old Mac, and briefly had my dual G4 “MDD” tower running a web server – but going alllll the way back to PowerPC was a bit too archaic. So I decided to fire up my old Apple Xserve 2,1 from early 2008 and put it back into service as my personal web server.
The Xserve is archaic enough to be worthy of my old domain name, yet new enough that putting it on the modern Internet isn’t a war-crime.
After some fiddling, which included locating eight 2Gig sticks of DDR2 FB dimms in an old box in the storeroom and three 1TB HDs that would actually run in the Xserve (they’re notoriously picky about HDs) – it lives!
The site is being served from OS X Server 10.6.8 using the built-in web services, and will probably end up as just a curious collection of old road signs pointing in various directions down equally old dirt roads to ghost towns of bygone eras.
Welcome to an unmarked exit off of the information superhighway in the middle of nowhere.
Back in early 2004 I moved from my home / unicorn sanctuary in Avon Colorado back to Fredericksburg Virginia for a potential teaching gig. This move was fairly spur of the moment and ultimately entailed getting rid of pretty much everything I owned that wouldn’t fit into a couple of suitcases. This included my fairly bleeding-edge PC that I’d built, but part of the deal with accepting the position was getting a new laptop to replace the PC.
Now, I’ve always been fairly agnostic when it comes to computers — I’ll use anything really. But having gotten my start in the early 80’s on machines with a lot of … let’s say idiosyncrasies … I’ve always been into the underdog systems like Amiga, Apple, DEC Alpha, HP PA-RISC, etc. I’m also an official old-school pointy-hat Unix wizard, so I tend to prefer Unix-like systems whenever I get an option.
So that all said, the laptop I requested was a brand new hot off the press 17″ Apple Powerbook G4. At the time in early 2004, the 1.33Ghz model was the tippy-top of the Apple line – $3200 of brushed aluminum and PowerPC architecture — and that’s what I was bribed with. The day I picked it up from CompUSA, I also picked up another gig of ram for it. That 1 gig stick was about $250.
I pretty much lived off of that laptop until shortly after I started at my current place of employment. I had to sell it to finance a PC being as all of the work I was doing at work was Windows-based and I needed a comparable system… And PC gaming was a big deal at a place that tested PC games for some weird reason…
But, I’ve always missed that laptop; it’s still the best laptop ever made in my not-so-humble opinion:
It’s from back when thermal performance was more important than being thin. So it’s huge, heavy, and built like a tank.
It has a screen that’s large enough you can actually see things from a few feet away.
It has every kind of port you could ever want built-in, versus today’s penchant for two generic ports and a bag full of dongles.
There’s an actual CD/DVD burner in it!
It has an amazing keyboard with actual keyboard sized keys and keyboard-like travel.
And it runs OS X, which is really BSD Unix with a candy-coated interface.
All that said, over the years I’ve on-again, off-again thought about acquiring another of these laptops just to have one again. But I had some criteria to meet if I was to purchase one just for “old time’s sake”… It needed to be a 17” 1.33Ghz model in absolutely mint condition — preferably still in the original box — and not cost a thousand dollars. I wanted to be able to pretend that I was the first owner, but I also know the G4 is just a curious footnote in computer history and really isn’t useful for much these days — so it’s not worth anything outside of sentimental value.
Well, all of my criteria was finally met a few weeks ago, and yesterday a virtually new 1.33Ghz 17″ G4 arrived.
About an acre of aluminum with an apple logo right in the middle.A couple of rub marks around the bezel, but otherwise in pristine condition.Usually the first question is “How big is that thing!?” Well, each palm-rest is the size of a CD case for a size comparison.
This is a ‘low miles’ PowerBook5,3 which has an 80G IDE HD and 1GB of ram. And while that’s nicely stock for this machine — I can do better.
I ordered 2 gigs of ram for the machine, which is the max it will hold and should be here later today. I also decided to add an SSD to it.
SSDs for PATA (IDE) systems were around in 2003, but were prohibitively expensive ($1000+ for about 60GB) — so I never put one in the laptop. But here we are in the future, so I was able to secure a 120GB mSATA drive and a 2.5″ mSATA to IDE adapter for about a hundred bucks.
Now to install it…
About 10,000 screws later and welcome to the internals of a G4 PowerBook. The mSATA and adapter are on top.
It’s nice to see the inside of the laptop is just as pristine as the outside. There was some evidence of use like a little bit of lint around the fans, which I took care of while I was in there, but otherwise nice and clean. Even the kapton tape Apple used to hold everything in place was still sticky and holding everything in place.
After about two hours of hardware and software install, here we are:
The laptop still needs its memory upgrade (this evening some time) and a new battery — which will happen as soon as I find one for under a hundred bucks. But otherwise, is actually really usable.
Safari works (mostly) and iTunes works (mostly), so I’ll restore one of my backups to the machine some time this weekend and play around with antique photoshop. 🙂
This morning’s bit of computer wizardry was bringing an Apple Powerbook 165c back to life.
System 7.1, circa 1992… The first Macintosh OS you actually had to purchase.
The interesting thing with the 165c is it was the very first laptop with a 256 color display, and said display is a 9 inch 640×400 passive LCD.
As an aside, making a laptop with bezels this large here in 2020 would be a war crime.
This 165c has 8MB of ram and a 120MB HD (That’s megabytes — the average photo out of a modern iPhone is a bit less than 5MB, so you can fit about 25 photos on this drive). And the HD still works, which is kind of amazing for being a 27 year old moving part.
In 1993 when these came out they were around $3400, which is roughly $6000 in today’s money — and that’s pretty expensive no matter what era you’re from.
This one needed a diode replaced on the mainboard, which with equipment this old is an easy fix… Said diode is actually visible without a magnifying glass and can be reworked with a standard soldering iron.
Once it was working I fired up Crystal Caliburn on it for fun…
Today’s ‘nothing better to do’ project was reviving an old dual-G4 tower.
Absolutely original dual 867Mhz G4 with the Nvidia GeForce4 MX video, 2Gigs of ram, and 60Gig HD it came with. Running OS X 10.3.2.
It’s always interesting to me just how small and snappy old operating systems were. This machine is basically a pocket calculator with less storage space than a $20 USB key, and OS-wise it feels a lot faster than my bleeding-edge MacBook Pro…
I’ve got a bit of a special project coming up in the next week or two. Nothing work related, this one is a personal project and it requires these:
OSX 10.3, 10.4, and 10.5.I have another boxed 10.5 set with the “New Version 10.5.4” sticker on the front.
You could say I’ve been doing the Mac thing for a while… I have actual boxed copies of operating systems going back to System 7, which was early 90’s and ran on my Quadra 800…
10.3 is what came on the Special Project.
10.4 is notable for still being able to run OS9 and associated applications, which was lost in 10.5.
10.5 is the last official version of OS X that will run on my Special Project.
On and off for a week now I’ve been attempting to create a Virtual Box VDI from an old set of Norton Ghost CDs I created back in 2003 — mostly for the entertainment value of it.
Tonight, I was successful.
Right where I left it on August 7th, 2003.
It’s interesting to have a fully functional “moment in time” of an evening seventeen years ago… So much of my online life back then was MP3s, MSN Messenger, and Alfandria/FurryMuck.
A few things didn’t work quite right:
Norton SystemWorks 2003 was mad because my subscription apparently ended in 2004.
The MSN Messenger service simply doesn’t exist anymore so the client was convinced there was a firewall preventing it from reaching the servers.
My SimpleMU bookmarks no longer work because the servers have moved.
And Outlook tried to check my email at Comcast and got notification that my account didn’t exist.
But some things still surprisingly worked like a champ… Like, eMule fired right up, found servers, and wanted to resume the torrent of an album I didn’t finish 17 years ago. Ad-Aware 6 automatically did a scan on boot. And Mad At Gravity started playing when I clicked play on WinAmp…
There’s also all of the odd bits of data; old roleplaying game plot lines and hastily jotted story notes, half finished artwork in the ‘recent’ section of Photoshop 7, and pieces of websites I was working on in NetObjects Fusion.
My first “personal” website went online in January of 1996, and was hosted by dimensional.com here in Denver. It was really just a tech demo and advertisement for my web design services…
Having a mix of programming and artistic skill back then was actually hard to find and turned out to be pretty marketable, and I sort of fell into the trade by accident. Between 1994 and 1996 I’d done several site designs for companies around the Denver Metro area and was pondering making a full-time job of it.
The Internet in the 90’s was all about bevels and drop shadows.
In March of ’97 I created my first non-business related personal site using my Ri’Hahn moniker. It was pretty basic as I’ve never been one for tooting my own horn, and was still hosted at dimensional.com…
I had to censor my actual name… The Internet used to be pretty innocent just like we used to have phonebooks.
Later, after moving to Virginia in 1997 I fired up my first personal domain, rihahn.com, in 1999. It was more or less done for the grins and giggles as I had a T1 running into my bedroom, lots of hardware laying around, and it seemed like a fun thing to do.
The earliest version of the site code that I still have. This is the 4th version of the site from March 2000.
This page is actually pretty complicated for the day; it’s made of a dozen images very precisely positioned to create what looks like a single image. This was to make the page look ‘active’ on a 28.8kbps modem while it was loading… A static image this size would result in a blank page for however long it took to download the entire image — around 10-15 seconds. But all of the smaller images would start loading at once and at least show that something was happening.
The JavaScript I wrote to run this page no longer runs in modern browsers for some reason, but there are mouseover effects and click animations on the buttons as well — also impossible to do on a static image.
The boxes on the lower right are from the non-existent visitor counter that has long since gone the way of the dodo. It would normally be horizontal numbers and the site was apparently in the 6-digits of visitors by early 2000.
Anyways, I used rihahn.com as both a personal website and a toy to play with rapidly evolving web technologies through 2002 when, due to a series of unfortunate complications with “real life”, the registration for the domain was dropped.
rihahn.com was quickly picked up by another registrar and was handed off from owner to owner over the next eighteen years.
I would periodically check and see if it was available again just for old time’s sake, but a six-letter domain with a clean registration history from before the Y2K bug is a pretty hot commodity.
In September I noticed that the current owner in Germany hadn’t updated their site in a long time, and decided to check on the domain registration. rihahn.com was in an expired hold for 30 days, after which if the owner didn’t pay for it it would go into a pending delete status for 5-6 days, and then would become available again.
I whipped up a script that would check the domain status once per minute and if the status changed would then run an Automator script in Safari on the GoDaddy site to register the domain… I kicked off the script in the 4th day of the pending delete status, and five days ago I became the owner of my old domain once again. 🙂
Currently the domain is just receiving emails, but eventually I’ll set up a web server and put up another personal website on it.
For my mono-no aware project I’ve been sifting though terabytes of archived data, searching for times and dates to try and build a timeline of the past.
Part of this has been looking through old emails — some of which date back to the invention of email and usually require data conversion as the app that created them hasn’t existed for a decade or more…
Once such application is Microsoft’s “Entourage”, an email app that came with office:mac back in the early 2000’s and which uses a no longer supported database to store email.
I used Entourage ages ago and archived the databases with my routine backups, but nothing will open them these days.
Luckily, I have a lot of antique hardware and software sitting around for just such situations:
A 1.8Ghz G5 iMac installing Office:Mac 2008.
Yesterday I set up a 1.8Ghz G5 iMac with OS X 10.5 so that I could install Office:Mac 2008. See, the 2008 version of Entourage will both read the old Entourage 2001 databases and export them as universal .mbox format. So now I have easily importable archives of email from twenty years ago.
